The main characters are connected by a bond forged on the battlegrounds of the Civil War, which was still raging.
History professor Dan Czitrom sits on the set of 'Copper.SOUTH HADLEY – “Copper,” a new historical crime drama set in New York City in 1864, is making its debut on BBC America Sunday at 10 p.m. If its gritty realism jumps off the screen and grabs a contemporary audience, as seems likely, some of the credit goes to an academic here in the Pioneer Valley.
History Professor Dan Czitrom of Mount Holyoke College serves as “historical advisor” to the show and was present, if not at conception, then shortly thereafter.
“What happened was serendipitous,” Czitrom said in an interview by phone from New York City on Wednesday, where he had been invited for a preview of the show.
In 2006, he got a call from screenwriter Will Rokos, who had seen Czitrom on a PBS documentary. “I’ve been a talking head in a number in a number of shows,” said Czitrom.
Rokos told him he had been working on pilot script called “Copper,” and he asked Czitrom to read it for historical accuracy. He couldn’t offer a fee because the script hadn’t been sold yet.
Czitrom agreed to read it and was impressed, as well he might be. Rokos’ resumé includes a nomination for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for the movie “Monster’s Ball.”
“I could tell he was serious about history,” said Czitrom, who arranged to meet Rokos in New York.
“Copper” is about an Irish immigrant named Kevin Corcoran, who returns from the Civil War to the Five Points neighborhood in lower Manhattan, to find that his daughter has been killed and his wife is missing. The tragedy adds a personal layer to his commitment as a policeman solving crimes.
The story is set in a particularly violent place and time, said Czitrom. The main characters are connected by a bond forged on the battlegrounds of the Civil War, which was still raging.
Five Points, the setting for the show, contained a mix of ethnic groups. Irish immigrants came in the wake of blight and starvation, but it was a “polyglot neighborhood,” as Czitrom calls it, with Blacks, Jews and Italians, too.
One of the characters in “Copper” is a self-taught Black physician named Matthew Freeman.
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln had instituted the first military draft in American history. Men could buy their way out of it for a payment of $300, but this amounted to a whole year’s pay for some. “The law was seen as tremendously unfair by working-class people,” said Czitrom. As a result, there were draft riots.
Part of the anger was directed at African Americans, who were exempt from the draft and were associated with the roots of the war. They were hunted down and lynched. A Colored Orphan Asylum holding 200 Black children was burned down on 43rd Street in 1864.
In the show, the writers wanted to have the asylum temporarily rebuilt in Five Points, but it was in situations like these that Czitrom intervened. It could never have happened, he said, because at that time Five Points was a “murderous place” for Black people to be.
Czitrom said sometimes his contributions are minor. “I’m reading the script and a characters says he’s going to take the trolley uptown,” he said. “Well, there were no trolleys at that time.
“Little details add up,” he said. “The big challenge is to make the show plausible.”
AMC was the first network to express interest in the show, but turned it down. After Rokos teamed up with Thomas Fontana, who had worked on “Homicide” and “St. Elsewhere,” they sold it to BBC America.
Czitrom, a New York native, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. For a while, before joining the faculty at Mount Holyoke in 1981, he drove a cab in New York City.